A Family That Surfs to a Beat: Its Own

Surfwise

Dorian Paskowitz and his wife, Juliette, with their nine children, around 1976.
Credit
Magnolia Pictures

There are many different ways to drop off the grid, but few dropped off with such style and urgency as Dorian Paskowitz, the paterfamilias of what is lovingly and at times enviably described as the first family of surfing. It was an intensity in part born of his passionately felt engagement with history as a Jew, which took him from Stanford Medical School in the 1940s to button-down respectability in the 1950s and, thereafter, on the road and into the blue yonder with a devoted wife, nine children, a succession of battered campers and the surfboards that were by turns the family’s cradles, playpens, lifelines and shields.

You meet Mr. Paskowitz, or Doc, straight away in the documentary “Surfwise,” Doug Pray’s wonderfully engaging look at love and family and the relentless pursuit of happiness, personal meaning and perfect waves. At least half the battle in the documentary is finding a worthy subject, and few live up to their screen time as easily as Doc, a born pitchman, part carny, part evangelical, who even in his 80s continues to spread the Paskowitz gospel (clean living, clean surfing) with fervor. It’s Doc who revs up the story, opening the family’s book of life while doing unclothed calisthenics in front of Mr. Pray’s hovering camera. As he shares his philosophy and leathery skin, Doc doesn’t earn your attention — he commands it.

Mr. Pray, a filmmaker with a thing for youth subcultures (his earlier films include “Hype!,” about the Seattle music scene), has an easygoing, accessible, silky-smooth style. Working with a tight team — Dave Homcy shot the movie on digital, and Lasse Jarvi edited it — he makes documentary filmmaking of this sort look deceptively easy. It isn’t, though you wouldn’t know it from how seamlessly he and his team integrate the talking-head interviews (the speakers helpfully identified); the locations (California, Hawaii, Israel); home movies; and news clips. Mr. Pray throws so many images and so much information at you — people and places, anecdotes and grudges — you may not immediately notice that all this groovy material has been marshaled into a very neat and conventional structure.

That’s less a complaint than an observation. “Surfwise” has a bohemian vibe and a cool sheen, but it’s an eager-to-please, pleasing commercial enterprise with a reassuring narrative arc (happy, sad, happy). Once Doc’s origin story has been told (the movie says he introduced surfing to Israel), the story moves into its most fascinating phase, namely that stretch in the 1960s and ’70s when he and his wife, Juliette, a Mexican-American looker with an apparently sturdy constitution, raised, with next to no money, eight boys and one girl — David, Jonathan, Abraham, Israel, Moses, Adam, Salvador Daniel, Navah and Joshua — in a 24-foot camper. A few family members repeat the number 24 as if they still can’t believe it; I’m more wowed by the number 9.

Doc, one of his sons explains with a mirthless laugh, was trying to repopulate the world with Jews. Certainly Doc’s sense of himself as a Jew who had escaped the Holocaust only by an accident of birth, by growing up in Southern California, hit him hard and kept hitting him. After two unhappy marriages and an unsatisfying professional stint in Hawaii, where he had settled after Stanford, Doc shed his worldly belongings and old ways, discovered the joys of sex (he’s hilariously ribald on the specifics of that joy) and dedicated himself to uncompromised, uncompromising freedom, embracing the road like Jack Kerouac, one difference being that this dharma bum had a ready-made commune. He fled the greater world, creating a smaller, manageable one in its place.

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For a time, the world Doc made fit neatly into that 24-foot camper. Nut brown and slender, the Paskowitz children were beautiful, ideal subjects for an exhilarating, persuasively liberating experiment. But they were also somewhat like lab rats, given to little nips that, in time, as childish energy morphed into adolescent aggression, evolved into violence bordering on the pathological. “I loved supporting the Reich,” says David, the eldest son, who became the captain in an increasingly authoritarian regime. David’s choice of words is pretty startling, particularly given that this is an observant Jewish family. But Mr. Pray, who tends to glide rather than dig, doesn’t root around in Doc’s psychology or the family’s hurt. He pauses and then he moves on.

From the on-screen evidence and from all those talking Paskowitz heads, it appears that the family mostly moved on too. That, at least, is the story that both they and Mr. Pray have chosen to tell. It’s a good, generally warming story, one that made me want to grab a surfboard or at least check out the family’s famous surf camp in San Diego, which, as it happens, was attended by Tommy Means, who along with Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and Jonathan Paskowitz, helped produce the movie. That further explains its clubby feel and perhaps Mr. Pray’s reluctance to push hard. The family that surfs together, it seems, stays together, in poverty and success, wipeouts and comebacks alike.

Directed by Doug Pray; director of photography, Dave Homcy; edited by Lasse Jarvi; music by John Dragonetti; produced by Tommy Means, Matthew Weaver, Jonathan Paskowitz and Graydon Carter; released by HDNet Films and Magnolia Pictures. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.